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Comment by bengale | Hacker News Reader

Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

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Given that this is UBS, I think this is, more than any other factor, a way for the company to prevent any way of employees establishing any kind of paper trail.

They seem to be getting caught up in scandal after scandal every time some news about something shady going on in the financial industry, the first thing I look for in the article is the letters 'UBS'.

Maybe I'm being too negative/tin-foil-hat here.

No paper trail? I'm pretty certain they already use email and digital documents. Allowing them to hotdesk (as this is essentially what it is) is hardly a way to prevent employees establishing a paper trail.

Digital documents can have established retention periods and mandated purges.

Indeed, I worked for a financial company that had a 90-day default purge on all e-mails and chat. You could drag some e-mails to a retention folder ( limited in overall size ) but as far as I recall that only protected them for another finite span of time.

Anything that needed a longer persistence had to be typed-up into a document and stored in Sharepoint, which was more manageable in terms of legal discovery than individual e-mails.

Are the execs that cook this up part of this or do they keep their (window?) offices?

Unlikely. Typically these rules are for the little people.

It sounds like there are no window offices. From the article:

> Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout the building.

They may actually be doing the employees a favour, since it's a false sense of security to think otherwise.

Saatchi (edit: might have been Chiat Day as mentioned downthread) tried this back in the '90s, and I think gave it up as a bad idea pretty quickly thereafter. I know some studios that still do hotdesking and reconfigurable workpods, but as far as I'm concerned it's a morale-killer.

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